Multiple severe performance issues under Windows

Question

I own a Macbook Pro, and have used it happily for around a year. However, the hard drive was too small (no idea why I decided to go for the 80), and my music library kept growing. At the same time, I needed a Windows machine for various other purposes, so I bought a Dell with Vista. I successfully transferred all of my music over to it, and downloaded iTunes. It installed fine, and all of my music showed up, and plays.
Here are the problems. Compared to OS X, iTunes on Windows *****. Unbelievably. It's incredibly sluggish (even basic things like scrolling through your library - smooth as silk on the Mac, but choppy on Windows. Resizing the window doesn't work well, either), and it has to have at least a few major memory leaks.
I'll give you some specifics.
Acting "Sluggish"
- Scrolling through my library (with either the scroll wheel of the mouse or the scrollbar on the right) is very choppy. This is not the case with any other application on my computer - scrolling through a list of entries is smooth and works well.
- Resizing the window frequently doesn't work. I'll grab the corner, and move the mouse over to another area. The mouse will be on a different part of the screen, but the iTunes window will not have resized at all. If I move the mouse, the window then resizes to where the mouse last was. In other words, if I want to resize the window, I have to grab the corner, drag to another size that I think I want, and then move the mouse a little to get it to go. This animation is also very choppy.
- Coverflow is very slow and moves at a very low framerate, fullscreen or otherwise.
- Oftentimes, the first keystroke (or two) will be completely ignored. So, for example, I'll hit Ctrl+L to get to the currently playing song, and have to press it 2 or 3 times in order for it to have any effect.
Memory Issues
- When I start iTunes (in the smallest window possible), it takes around 56 MB of memory, not playing anything. Once I start to play a song, it jumps a little, but ultimately doesn't change that much (now it's at 60 MB instead). I resized the window to be on most of the screen, and it's now at 66. Scrolling through my library on List View, while slow and choppy, doesn't take up any significant amount of memory. However, as soon as I change to either the "grouped with artwork" option or coverflow, bad things start happening.
- Grouped with Artwork: At the beginning, iTunes is taking up 70 MB of memory. Every time I hit Page Down, another 3-4 MB of memory is added. This memory is never released. So now, having scrolled down from the top a little, iTunes is now sitting at twice what it was at the beginning, or 145 MB. It's now taking up more memory than Firefox.
- Coverflow: Starting out at 145 MB from the earlier view, switching to coverflow immediately makes the memory jump to 170 MB. When I scroll through the albums, the memory then jumps anywhere from 40 - 50 MB. After a bit of clicking, iTunes is now taking up 1,106 MB of memory.
I minimize iTunes, and 1 MB of memory is freed. iTunes is now at 1,105 MB.
Moving out of CoverFlow view does a good job at cutting some memory use, but it's still at 540 MB. And at this point, I'm back to where I started (in terms of what iTune's doing: list mode, small window, not playing), only at 9 times the memory use. As far as I know, there's no way to reclaim that memory.
Various Issues
- iTunes will frequently disregard the first or even second keystroke, as mentioned above.
- This scenario is a little harder to describe, but I'll do my best. iTunes is the foremost application. The focus is on song panel (the main part), so that pressing the Up and Down arrow keys cause the "currently selected" blue background thing behind a song to move up or down, enter plays the currently selected song, etc. I Alt-Tab to another application, and then Alt-Tab back. It looks like I'm in the same situation as before (the currently selected song is blue, instead of grey), but the up and down keystrokes do nothing. I'm apparently in a different section of iTunes. Pressing Tab brings me to the left panel of iTunes - the Music / Movies / Podcasts / Ringtones / etc. part, but the up and down keys don't do anything there either. Tabbing again takes me to the search field, and that works. And tabbing once more brings me back to where I should have been as soon as I Alt-Tabbed back to iTunes.
- A variant situation: focus is as described at the beginning, and I Alt-Tab out and back into iTunes. Again, the up and down keys don't work, but then if I press Shift + Tab (to go to the previous field), it starts working again.
This issue is much more of a pain than it sounds. If I'm in iTunes, and I'm chatting online, for example, I might need to switch out quickly to type a line in, and then switch back, but the workflow has been completely disrupted because I can't navigate with the keyboard anymore.
- When editing a song title in iTunes, I select it first, and then press F2. This causes the title to become a "rename" field, which works mostly fine. With one exception. Generally, in these fields, you edit the title to your heart's desire, and then press Enter to signify that you are done. However, in iTunes, if I have a song title "blowin' in the wind", and I want to capitalize it, I'll hit F2, and then move the cursor over to the beginning of the title (in other words, to right before the "b"). My goal is to delete the lowercase b, and replace it with an uppercase B. So I press Delete, and then type B. However, as soon as I press the Delete key, iTunes deletes the character, and then closes the rename field. It's as though I pressed Delete and then Enter. If I then type B, I'm taken the first song starting with a B, which is not what I want at all.
- iTunes doesn't work with Vista's window preview (Aero interface, Alt+Tab or hovering over the program in the tray at the bottom) when it's minimized.
- When I have iTunes on in the background, and plug in an iPod, it all works fine, except for when I bring the window up. For whatever reason, iTunes doesn't repaint the window right at all. It's a horrific mixture of whatever songs were in the list view before and the iPod options.
I'm sure I have more issues, but those are the ones that come to the top of my head. Note that I have none of these problems in iTunes on the Mac.
Apple, if you're going to release software for Windows, please make it work.

Answer 1

In article <[email protected]>, Javerkio wrote:
> we are running GW 8.02 hp3 and recently moved our main post
> office (~600 users) from Netware to Windows 2008 R2 (running under
> Vsphere 4.1).
>
Windows is the lowest performing host for GroupWise, so that is a part
of what you are hitting.
How are you monitoring memory usage? I've found that the vCenter tools
aren't a good indicator of that, where as the Windows tools are better
in that respect. The biggy is that you don't want much paging to disk.
How much do you have assigned to this VM?, how many cores? And are
these ESX box(es) over committed on those two?
Those settings on their own don't really mean a whole lot. What we need
to see is what is actually being used, and if you are running out of
them, then upping those specific numbers can help. The best way is to
watch the POA web interface for the relevant settings.
http://hostnameorIP:7181/
Andy Konecny
Knowledge Partner (voluntary SysOp)
KonecnyConsulting.ca in Toronto
Andy's Profile: http://forums.novell.com/member.php?userid=75037